Embedded Files
Hint: Use the shortcuts in the upper right-hand corner of the screen at any time to quickly move between sections!
Once upon a time, a little girl named Alice was playing by the riverbank while her sister sat beneath a tree, absorbed in a book. Alice, curious as she was, wandered over and peered over her sister's shoulder, only to be shocked by the lack of pictures. This scene opens Lewis Carroll's 1865 story Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, one of many pieces of 19th century literature that colored the imagination of children throughout Europe and the Americas. Now through adaptations such as those by Disney and Nippon Animation, these stories have spread throughout societies across the globe, all the way from Syria and the Arab world, to Japan and East Asia. Over the last two-hundred years, what has defined the stories we tell our children has matured and grown up with each generation.
Background
Background
During the Belle Époque following the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and preceding World War I in 1914, a newfound peace and proliferation of the arts was particularly evident across Europe. Amanda Craig of Independent describes that, "The First Golden Age, which took off in the 1850s, thanks to the increasing number and status of children, was particularly dominated by five authors. J. M. Barrie, Robert Louis Stevenson, E. Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Anna Sewell all wrote in distinctly different genres that have been passed on, like DNA, to present-day authors" (Craig). To live during this period of time was to be one of the pioneers of what today makes up the canon of Western literature. To follow a trail of breadcrumbs today could not be without Hansel having scattered them first. What may be seen as tropes now were during this era at the cusp of only being defined and having a name attached to them.
Since the popularization of the Internet following the turn of the 21st century, an ever-growing deluge of technology and entertainment is being released, and children born today will grow up with no lack of things to watch. Shows such as the ones aired by popular networks like ABC Kids generally feature recurring casts of characters. The episodic format allows for many quick and concentrated explorations on one theme at a time. In a way, each show is its own Grimms' Fairy Tales, and each episode is its own Pied Piper of Hamelin with a moral to be learned by the end of the story.
In contrast to well-regulated public television networks, platforms like YouTube allow for anyone to upload anything they can think of within reason. That fundamental and structural change has made the largest impact regarding children's programming throughout the last decade. Among those in preschool and below, channels featuring nursery rhymes are among the most popular videos on YouTube as a whole. In addition, both indie and well-established brands compete against one another on equal ground. Many public television networks host streamable versions of their content on the website, such as Peppa Pig on its official YouTube channel.
These two periods in time—the late 19th century as it bled into the early 20th century, and now the Information Age we live in today in the 21st century—both are and were prevalent with works aimed towards children. However, were there qualities to the past that were better than that found today? What are the advancements which have been made now that could have never been done before, and have improved the lives of children?
Past
Past
One of the most important works of the Belle Époque is a book by the name of A Little Princess. The story was released in 1905 by the English author Frances Hodgson Burnett, who was 55 years old at the time of the story's release. The novel follows the life of a young girl from India by the name of Sara Crewe. Daughter to a wealthy father in the diamond mining industry, and to her late mother of French origin, the story begins with Sara and her father traveling by ship to the city of London, where she is to enroll in an all-girls boarding school. It is here that she experiences the luxuries that England has to offer, as her father spoils her with lavish clothing and furniture. At the school, Sara quickly makes many friends and wins the adoration of her classmates. That does not, however, mean that she made no enemies to speak of.
While the story of A Little Princess makes itself out to be quite picturesque and indicative of many innocent fairy tale traits, as the story progresses, Sara's prospects become more grim. Partway through the story, Sara's father falls sick of an illness before passing away. Notified on her birthday of all days, Sara loses her source of income and is expelled from her life as a student of the boarding school. Pleading for any way to remain within the academy without an income from her father, the school's headmaster permits Sara to begin working in the kitchen as a maid. It is here that our hero experiences the many hardships that come with living in the 19th century, and moreover at the bottommost rung of society. Often, she would be overworked and without food for lengthy periods of time. Without anyone of status to vouch for her anymore, the future seemed dire. Not even being a kid was enough to spare her from the pains of child labor.
"I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad for children. I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him I can never count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest letter saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even if they are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy tales, because it frightens them. You might just as well say that it is cruel to give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry. All this kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting of what a child is like which has been the firm foundation of so many educational schemes. If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them. There is just as much difficulty in saying exactly where pure pain begins in his case, as there is in ours when we walk of our own free will into the torture-chamber of a great tragedy. The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from the universe of the soul"
Whether the latter portion of A Little Princess is appropriate for children may not be very obvious. For a child to read and hear the horrors that someone no different from them but in a place in time can have experienced throughout the story may terrify them. Regarding this, the English author G. K. Chesterton has defended the idea in his 1909 book Tremendous Trifles. He supports the idea of horror appearing in children's literature and fairy tales, as it is not the literature that teaches fear, but describes the fears that they already had.
Works from the 19th century were made both with the limitations of their medium, as well as the limitations of their era, and that can be taken for better or for worse. Lydia Murdoch states in The Age of Alice: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Nonsense in Victorian England that, "Victorian ideals of childhood thus remained contingent on class identity, but Alice’s puzzlements in Wonderland also mirrored earlier debates from the 1830s and 1840s over child workers in British factories and mines. Child labor was by no means new to nineteenth-century industrial Britain" (Murdoch). Destitution was the reality most people lived in, and the reality most people would have related to during that period. Whether through ink and parchment or through the everyday spoken word, everyone grew up with fairy tales in one way or another.
Present
Present
If any author of children's literature from 150 years ago could travel in time to today, they might be amazed at the improvements which have been made since then. As film, electricity, and the Internet have become more readily available, they as tools and mediums have also been used to create for every age group and demographic. PBS Kids launched in 1994—at first under the name PTV, but in 1999 changing their name—as a public television network for children's programming. The network is most well known among adults today who grew up with Elmo, Cookie Monster, and friends on Sesame Street, or Fred Rogers on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. In a time where research, statistics, and general knowledge about the world is readily available and in abundance through the Internet, the biggest advancement in children's entertainment is that of the edutainment genre.
Educational entertainment, though usually shortened to edutainment, defines the overlap between content intended to grab the attention of the viewer in addition to teaching them something practical. Elinor Wonders Why is a 2020 American-Canadian animated series currently releasing under PBS Kids. Mindy Weisberger of Live Science describes the premise of the show: "An inquisitive bunny named Elinor leads her friends in adventures around Animal Town. Along the way, they encounter new challenges and discover mysteries of the natural world that they've never seen before and don't understand. But Elinor and her animal companions also find that observation and investigation can help them piece together clues to find solutions and solve problems—just like scientists do" (Weisberger).
Throughout the show, Elinor and her friends ask themselves various questions based on the curiosities they find throughout their daily lives. These observations might include wondering why ants work together to create hills, why birds chirp with one another, or why moths are attracted to light. It may not be too obvious of a thing to appreciate, but the fact that children today can engage in long running shows like Elinor Wonders Why with a recurring cast of likable characters and a new thing to learn each episode is one of the strongest benefits to modern children's entertainment. Not only that, but the lessons that each episode teaches are relevant to skills used in the modern day. Mary Anne Lane of Georgia Public Broadcasting describes the show as one that, "encourages children to follow their curiosity, ask questions, figure out the answers, and learn about the natural world around them using their science inquiry skills" (Lane).
Besides traditional broadcasting networks, caretakers and their little ones today are moving away from traditional cable television and towards online entertainment like that found on YouTube. Noticing and supporting this ongoing change, Google released YouTube Kids in February of 2015, intended to create easy access to children's entertainment while not compromising on the ethics of having that entertainment be placed beside harmful videos or advertisements. Since then, independent creators make up the largest share of the market. Among the two- to five-year-old age group, CoComelon is by far the largest channel, being the third most subscribed and second most viewed on the website. The channel primarily features nursery rhymes about basic skills like learning to wash your hands, and does not have any character development or story to speak of. Between various anecdotes from worried parents regarding whether their children were becoming addicted to the repetitive content, Martin Robinson cites Sally Hogg of the University of Cambridge: "The impact of watching online content on early child development depends on three things: the content of the media, the context in which they are watching it, and what they are not doing as a result of watching it. If very young children are watching digital media, it's important that it's not taking up so much time that it reduces their opportunities to play, to interact with adults and other children, and to be active" (Robinson).
As children age up to become elementary schoolers, they are likely to become more interested in the millions of other channels YouTube has to offer, such as those by Minecraft and Nintendo YouTubers Stampylonghead and Chuggaaconroy. In a New York Times article written by Noel Murray, he sets the scene for the change that is occurring: "Like a lot of American adolescents, 14-year-old Archer Murray and his 11-year-old sister, Cady, spend their free time reading, playing games, talking with friends and watching videos on the Internet. With their laptops, cellphones and tablets, they click on YouTube, searching for a range of content like episodes of Japanese cartoons and tips on what to do in Minecraft. They almost never turn on a television set or watch anything produced by a broadcast or cable network. Their father—me—consumes a typical adult TV diet of sitcoms, prestige dramas and reality shows, but the Murray children are embracing the new kind of broadcasting, which circumvents the old media gatekeepers and delivers content better tailored to their interests" (Murray).
Throughout most of human history, culture has swapped hands and evolved. The mediums within which that culture resided, however, did not typically change. As far as home entertainment is concerned, prior to TikTok came YouTube, then TV, radio, and eventually the novel and printed media. That is to say that until the invention of the printing press during the 15th century, what existed was that which was typically passed down orally. What Murray is experiencing is a microcosm of this phenomenon.
Future
Future
The modern and the old have mixed with one another through adaptations such as those by Disney and Nippon Animation. In a New York Times essay, Dave Kim describes a trip to the Alps with his son, and their sudden interest in Heidi, a story from over a hundred years ago: I went to the Alps in August because my son—a New York City third grader obsessed with baseball, projectiles and YouTube—fell in love this summer with the Swiss children’s novel Heidi" (Kim). He elaborates: "It is a truth widely known among parents that no matter where you go in the world, or how exotic the itinerary, the hotel pool will always be the highlight for your young children. To be fair, this one was magical after a day of Alp-hopping, the water arctic and curative. Watching my son, I recognized Heidi’s near-feral energy and optimism, her jolly disregard of decorum and civility, and it became a little clearer to me why R and generations of other unruly children had found a counterpart in her. Theirs was a joy burdened by neither earthly concerns nor fantasy—a love of present circumstance, of a real life that was plenty good enough" (Kim).
In addition to children today rereading and experiencing the works of the past, there are also adaptations of children's classics being released today. An adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 work Anne of Green Gables is being adapted by The Answer Studio in Japan. Vera Vargas of CBR describes the premise as: "Anne of Green Gables begins when Anne Shirley is 11, and she spent most of her young life being tossed from foster home to foster home. The foster homes she's known have been cruel. Anne was never treated like an actual child after her parents' death and before she met the Cuthberts, but she retreats into her imagination to keep her spirit and to cope with her difficult life. Everything changes on Prince Edward Island when a shy elderly brother, Matthew Cuthbert, and his stoic sister, Marilla, take in Anne. Anne gets a true childhood and education on Prince Edward Island" (Vargas). The takeaway to have is that there is still a vast amount of interest from the general public in reimagining stories from the past—particularly of the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
When it comes to deciding what is right for children to watch, who is the onus on? One could say that the responsibility falls on the government to regulate things. This has worked in the past with traditional broadcasting, and most parents should be able to feel secure allowing their children to watch that TV. As far as creators and those who hold the reins of the biggest platforms are concerned, The Motion Picture Association film rating system, for instance, was created to allow parents and viewers an easy way to tell whether any piece of media was appropriate for what audience. While this works for film, a comprehensive system for independent creators on YouTube may be necessary. While bureaucracy may stunt creativity and make it difficult for independent creators to upload as they please, even systems as small as parental controls and forbidding ads to be shown to the youngest of children can be quite effective at protecting them.
Whether it is works from the past or works from the present, the most important thing for any parent is determining themselves what is right for the children in their own care. What piques the curiosity and interest of a child as they learn more and more about the world in their most vulnerable and innocent age should be appreciated and encouraged as much as possible. Kids cannot help but grow older, and the experiences gained from their fleeting and transient youth need to form strong foundations for adulthood. From A Little Princess to Elinor Wonders Why, the progression of children's media has grown alongside humanity, and is shaped by the choices made by parents, platforms, and creators.
Google Sites
Report abuse